But too often, our social needs aren’t met at the office. We come in, make the donuts and leave. The line drawn between work and play leaves many employees feeling alone and isolated in a place where we spend the majority of our waking hours.

While getting stuff done is our ultimate goal, socializing and friendships in the workplace bring both personal and business benefits. Simple things like work happy hours, team bonding experiences and or even technology like a social intranet that encourages collaboration can put your office on a healthier and happier path. Research has even shown that employees who have friends at work are 50% more satisfied!

So what are you waiting for? Read on for the additional benefits of being social at work via an enterprise collaboration platform.

Create a Sense of Community

According to a survey from Officevibe, 74 percent of women and 58 percent of men said that camaraderie was so important that they would pass up a higher salary "if it meant not getting along" with their colleagues. Creating a sense of camaraderie with a social intranet that enables more opportunities for teams and departments to work together will help employees feel more understood and more engaged. This leads to team members who are more likely to speak up and offer suggestions – and could lead to your next big idea.

Increase Productivity and Motivation

Isolation and feeling disconnected can zap your motivation and productivity like nobody’s business. Social connections at the office make work more bearable and can actually provide the impetus needed to deliver on those deadlines. A Harvard study even found that people with friends at work are 40% more likely to receive promotions. Now go find that work BFF.

Encourage Collaboration Among Friends

Collaboration can only take place when employees are willing to speak up and speak truthfully. Innovation and collaboration go hand-in-hand, and they thrive in environments where people have the confidence to make suggestions and dream big. Establishing social connections at work makes this process a whole lot easier and more natural. Using a social intranet platform is an easy way to promote connections and collaboration and set everyone on the right path.

Increase Loyalty to the Company

The Officevibe survey also found that 50% of employees who say they have a best friend at work also reported feeling a strong connection to their company. This could be due to the fact that workers with strong social connections at work are overall more satisfied and engaged, leading to an improved perception of their employer. Whatever the reason, the proof is in the pudding that creating a friendly and community-driven workplace is good for business.

Some might say that having friends at work is a “nice-to-have” or added job perk. In reality, it’s beneficial for everyone (both employers and employees), and companies should brainstorm ways they can cultivate an environment where people feel like friendships are encouraged at work.

Give Incentive a try for free to see how it can improve your employees’ relationships and collaborative spirits.

Close relationships are fundamental to happiness and health, so why would we shortchange ourselves in that arena just because we’re at work? Fostering a positive, relaxed and fun work environment allows employees to bond more easily with their peers.

In a business world where time is money, no one wants to feel poor. Unfortunately, it seems that when our day-to-day is filled with unlimited distractions and new possibilities, everyone is scrambling for more hours in the day.

It’s a statistic we talk about all the time – Millennials are slowly overtaking every other demographic in the workplace. By 2025, Millennials will comprise the majority of the workforce, and it’s important for companies to know how to recruit and groom them for their organizations’ benefit.

One of the wonderful benefits of technology dominating the workplace is all of the apps it’s brought into our lives. Business tools like Dropbox, Skype, Google Drive, Slack and various time-tracking tools are available at the click of an “install” button, and each offer their own take on optimizing our time and increasing productivity.

CEOs and research consistently report that innovation is the most important ingredient for company growth. And any manager worth his or her salt will tell you that a culture of innovation is only possible when it’s promoted and encouraged from within.

Enterprise social collaboration platforms are great for making work more social - it's in the name, after all. The technology enables teams to interact more freely, work together more easily and share documents, files and - yes - even pictures.

As more and more businesses and teams adopt social collaboration tools, they begin to reap the perks of working more collaboratively. Among the chief benefits is seeing the waters of their internal email floods recede.

Incentive Spring 2015 is here - just under the seasonal wire (c'mon, summer doesn't officially start until June 21) - and with it comes a complete package of our updated enterprise social collaboration tools to enable you and your coworkers you get way more stuff done than you ever thought possible.

Sales and marketing often work in tandem and synchronized unison. They’re two peas in a pod, Batman and Robin, peanut butter and jelly. Unfortunately, while the two roles rely on each other for success, feedback and guidance, getting sales and marketing teams to collaborate and communicate effectively has sometimes been a bumpy road.

In this digital age, instant messaging has essentially become a way of life. From the good ole days of AOL Messenger to modern means of texting, Slack, What’s App, Yammer, Jive and Skype, the options and opportunities for instant messaging are endless.

Do you have an enterprise social network (ESN) in your organization? You know, like an internal Facebook or Twitter of sorts, where you collaborate on work initiatives. If you do, you're one of the early adopters, driven by real-time, knowledge-centric communication.

Intellectual Property (IP) retention has always been an important issue for organizations. And it’s becoming increasingly more important as Baby Boomers retire and Millennials take over the workforce. Adding to the issue is the younger demographic’s tendency to move from job to job quickly, with an average tenure of just around two years at any single workplace.

At Incentive, we deliver an enterprise social collaboration platform with a feature set so rich that users have access to all of their knowledge, information and communication in a single location, giving the organization complete control. Users don't have to wander outside of Incentive for additional programs or rely on unapproved or unsafe services to "Get Stuff Done, Together."

I’ve been attending Collision’s sister conference, Web Summit, for years. When the organization that throws Europe’s biggest annual tech event decided to launch here in the States, I was excited to not only attend, but also to showcase Incentive’s technology. We applied, were selected to exhibit, and, “Bam!” We were off to Vegas!

Though it’s often seen as a time-consuming or costly process, onboarding new employees is extremely important – and can all too often be overlooked. A 2013 survey by CandE found that almost half of prospective employees evaluate a company’s initial materials to assess whether or not the employer is a good cultural and personal fit.